Do you feel like every month, come reporting time you’re drowning in reporting metrics and numbers that you just don’t understand? You’re not alone! Many small businesses who take on their own marketing in-house aren’t equipped to analyse and pull insights from every single platform they’re advertising on. There are just so many metrics and not enough time to make sense of them all. So we’ve written this blog to help. After reading it, you should have a better idea of what social media metrics you need to measure.
What metrics are the most important to measure?
The metrics that matter most to you will depend on the objective of your campaign. If your goal was to create brand awareness for a new product or service, you’ll want to look at metrics like reach, views and impressions. If your goal was to get people to your website, then you’ll want to look at metrics like clicks.
There are four pillars of metrics in social media. Awareness, engagement, conversion and loyalty. Each of these pillars contains a set of metrics within them to help you measure the effectiveness of your campaign.
Awareness
Brand awareness is how many people have seen or shared your brand on social media.
Metrics to look at include:
| Impressions | The number of times your ad was seen. |
| Views | The number of times your video was watched. |
| Reach | The number of people your posts reached (note: impressions will always be higher than reach as one person may see your ad multiple times) |
| Post Likes | A metric that indicates your followers are engaging with your content. |
| Page Likes | A metric that indicates how many people are happy to hear from your brand or business. |
| Shares | A metric that indicates your content is compelling or enjoyable enough to share. |
| Mentions | A metric that shows people are excited and compelled to share that they are associated with your business or brand. |
Make sure that you run your reports with the same time period each time (ie: last 30 days compared to the 30 days before that) You need to compare apple with apples in order to gain proper insight into your social media’s effectiveness.
Engagement
Engagement includes page likes, shares and most importantly post acknowledgement (likes or emoji reactions) and comments. If your content has a high engagement rate, it’s a sign that your content is resonating with people. You can start to see trends in what content works and what content doesn’t.
Virality rate
For a piece of content to be deemed ‘viral’, it needs to have a high amount of unique views. To calculate your content’s virality rate, note down the total amount of all your post impressions and shares. Then divide the number of shares by the number of impressions. Divide the result by 100 to get a percentage.
Conversions
Conversion metrics include clicks, CTR (click-through-rate), cost per click, bounce rate (Google Analytics), conversion rates and CPM (cost per thousand impressions).
Clicks and click-through rate
Both of these metrics simply confirm that your ad or offer was compelling enough to be clicked. If your CTR is low, consider changing your offer, creative, ad text or call to action button.
Bounce rate
This metric can be found in your Google Analytics. If you don’t have Google Analytics installed on your website, pop that on your priority list! Bounce rate is a percentage that shows how quickly people left your site after arriving. The lower the percentage the longer they stayed. If the percentage is high, it means that the person arrived and very quickly left. This typically indicates that page they were taken to was not relevant, the website was not easy to navigate (or not optimised for mobile), or was not enticing enough.
Conversion rates
Your conversions show how many people successfully took the action you wanted them to take. A conversion could be a form fill, a purchase, a video view. You can set whatever conversion is important to you and then track it.
TIP: Install a Facebook pixel to track actions people take on your website.
CPC and CPM rates
These metrics tell you how much it costs you to get that click or get those 1,000 impressions from people. Typically, the cost of these can be reduced the longer you advertise on a platform. They will also generally be lower if your campaign has been built well (ie: good targeting, quality ad, good offer, etc.)
Loyalty
This can simply be measured with testimonials and reviews from people who have used your product or service.
Know you need to be online but aren’t sure where to start? Focus SME helps small to medium size businesses connect with more potential customers to make more sales. We provide social media management and digital marketing services for small to medium businesses that don’t have the time or find it all too overwhelming. Want to know more? Get in touch with us here.